Recognizing
that a key ingredient of the musical construction of production
music maleness is "gunfighter music" opens a fascinating
hermeneutic window on corporate culture. The "gunslinger"
or "cowboy" archetype appears repeatedly in American
business folklore, usually associated with the most macho, high-risk
sectors of the financial world (currency and stock speculation,
real estate), and with the high-pressure worlds of sales and
marketing. The tendency for businessmen to see themselves as
Wild West figures is most intense when the economy is booming.
The late 1960s saw Wall Street overrun by so-called "go-go
gunslingers"stockbrokers who displayed a "steady
hand" and an "iron nerve" when picking high-risk
investments. But the true heyday of cowboy capitalism was ushered
in by the rise of Texas oil money and the ascension to power
of Ronald Reagan, the paradigmatic "man on horseback,"
in 1980the same year the first industrial tracks began
appearing in the production music library of a new company called
Network Music.

One example
can stand in for literally hundreds. (Search the business publications
in the Lexis-Nexis database back through the 1980s with the
keywords "cowboy" and "gunslinger" and you
can read for weeks.)

Russ
Fraser chain-smokes Marlboros. He keeps a cactus plant in
his Wall Street office and quarterhorses on his Wyoming dude
ranch. Most days, he wears Western riding boots under his
suit pants and sports a brass-buckled gunslinger's belt.

"I
guess theres a pattern here," Mr. Fraser says,
between drags on his cigarette. "Ive always wanted
to be a cowboy." Truth be told, the 48-year-old president
of Fitch Investors Service Inc. bears little resemblance to
John Wayne or William Bonney. But if cowboys are measured
by their bravado, neither the Duke nor Billy the Kid can hold
a candle to Mr. Fraser.

As
head of an investor group that took over 76-year-old Fitch in
April, the tough-talking executive boasts that he can turn the
sleepy Manhattan company into the country's dominant bond-rating
agency.3

It is not
immediately obvious why a man who rates bonds for a living
should play the desperado with such desperate urgency. As Marshall
McLuhan complained in 1951, at the height of the Westerns
popularity, "The public has never been home on the range,
and the frontier disappeared before this generation was born.
It lives in a crowded, peppy, optimistic world of bustle and
systematic change. Why should it be obsessed with an archaic
past in which there was no commerce, no routine, no change?"4
That the cowboy, an itinerant laborer in a pre-, even anti-capitalist
milieu, should become an avatar of go-go American capitalism,
is an irony noted by many cultural historians.

But as McLuhan
goes on to point out, the class position of the historical cowboy
is of little import; what is important is the lessons in masculine
deportment taught by his celluloid reflection:

Even
a casual glance at horse-opera heroes suggests that they share
with the ideal businessman and the athlete certain qualities
of muscular asceticism and harshness. The puritanical rigor
of the celluloid frontier appeals to those who have espoused
other kinds of rigor in their business and social lives. So
the cowboy is as non-erotic as the hard-driving executive.5

McLuhans
insight has become the dominant mode for reading Westerns as
cultural practice. Jane Tompkins, in her key feminist study
of the genre, West of Everything, puts it categorically:
"what is most interesting about Westerns is their
relation to gender, and especially the way they create a model
for men who came of age in the twentieth century."6
If Western movies are, as Lee Clark Mitchell argues, fundamentally
about the process of "making the man," then when a
producer grabs a Network Music industrial track that captures
the feel of a Hollywood Western, the muscular sound of men
becoming men, and when he slaps it into a business presentation,
is he just producing another slide show? Or does he have a hand
in the larger and ongoing project of producing and reproducing
the masculine subject?

THE
MAGNIFICENT SEVEN IN THE BOARDROOM

This is,
admittedly, pretty speculative stuff. Does the fact that "industrial,"
the musical style which represents business to itself, shares
key features with the soundtrack of a famous Western film really
imply that the men who deliver and listen to business presentations
that incorporate industrial tracks are somehow seeing themselves
as heroes in a Western? Well, luckily enough, I can show you
that at least one popular guide to effective business presentation
makes the connection almost spookily explicit.

Consider
this cartoon: Harold, a mild-mannered software salesman, is
being coached by Sally, a communication expert, through the
preparations for a crucial presentation. She needs him to understand
that every business presentation must use what she calls the
"Win-Story Format," in which "a heroic figure,
with a little help, overcomes enormous odds." (View
cartoon) Shes able to get him clued in by asking him
to recall his favorite movie, which is, of course, The Magnificent
Seven. Harold is ready to go, ready to present himself,
inspire others, and make the sale, as soon as he realizes that
all business presentations must have the structure of The
Magnificent Seven: they must tell the tale of the (masculine)
hero. (Sally's attempt to argue The Wizard of Oz as a
female "hero-story" is a clever piece of political
correctness, but ultimately unconvincing.)

Is there
any question as to what kind of music Harold will need to underscore
his corporate swagger? With musical compadres like Williams,
Bernstein, Copland, Korngold, and Strauss, the corporate cowboy
can ride tall in the saddle all the way to the last industrial
roundup. Move 'em out!